Final Entry

I have experienced a number of new technologies this semester that I had never used before. It will be interesting to try them out in the context of real courses that I teach with real assignments and connections to education. I now definitely have a number of new options for performance-based assessment ideas, classroom organization tools and resources for myself and my students.

Our final presentations confirmed many of my hesitations regarding technology, but also enlightened me to many new things I did not know about. The presentations covered a number of technologies I had never heard of and have never used, and am excited to explore. In particular, the WebQuest and the Scrapblog site stuck out to me. I had seen WebQuests before, but had never really explored them. The Scrapblog site seemed kind of like a glorified PowerPoint, but with designs and formats that I think would really appeal to young people. I also liked the Mario and Monique's presentations, because I liked the way the camera seemed to pan over the presentation as a whole.

The other blogs I visited were Mario's The Big Onion, Natalina's Keeping Up Globally with Mathematics, Frank's Life as a Science Teacher and College Coach, and Lauren's Literacy and Technology. I thought it was interesting to see how different everyone's blogs were. Some people's blogs were very short but frequent, and others' were more like mine, where they were posting less often, but were writing much more in depth. It was also interesting to hear what other people were experiencing with all of the projects and new technologies.

WOW Project Reflection

I was pretty frustrated with the way my WOW project presentation turned out. I was very concerned about making sure that my project involved interaction but did not create opportunities for technological difficulties for my classmates. So, I decided to use Mind42.com to create a collaborative graphic organizer with my classmates of the different technologies we learned over the course of the semester and how they fit in with the 6 C's of motivation. I thought this would teach the content of the 6 C's as well as actually put them into practice.

So, to avoid any technological problems, I spent quite a bit of time creating individual log-ins for every member of the class to use on Mind42.com so that everyone would just have to log in and be ready to go for the project. Unfortunately, this website, which is designed for the purpose of collaborating, apparently crashed when we tried to collaborate. This is my biggest issue with technology--it so often creates more problems than the solutions it provides. Not always, of course, but it is so incredibly frustrating in a situation such as this, where time did not allow me to turn to an alternative.

Other than that, I enjoyed planning and researching for my project. It was an interesting challenge to try to make an online presentation both enjoyable and interactive for everybody. This was certainly a different type of presentation than any I have ever had to do before.

Super Cool School

I watched the demo video for SuperCoolSchool and was very impressed. It reminded me a lot of WizIQ or WebEx but it seemed more tailored for students. I think it would be a fun idea to use something like this in a classroom to empower students to become their own "experts" in something. They could start their own schools, or we could start our own school as a class, and they could offer classes taught by themselves. This could be a great alternative to group or individual presentations or a great way to teach public speaking with a fun technological twist. Students enjoy being masterful at something, and a tool like this could help them display their expertise. This could integrate areas in students' lives where they feel like experts, such as pop culture or technical skills, and areas where they don't, such as schoolwork.

My Videos

These are the two videos I made for our video assignments. I tried to create videos that I could potentially use in my own high school English classrooms, so I chose to cover literary elements.

Parent Newsletter Project

I enjoyed our group's parent newsletter project, if only for the fact that I appreciated becoming aware of how much easier it could be to communicate with parents if I implemented an online method. LetterPop in particular is very easy to use, and even though it comes with formats that make it very easy and quick to make pretty generic newsletters, it also is flexible enough that you can make it your own. In the end, we chose LetterPop because it is so easy, quick and reliable, and it is easy to publish it for others to access. We had some trouble with the Scrapblog website, and turned to LetterPop instead. Since I will be teaching high school and will have five times as many students as my elementary counterparts, I really appreciate the value of accessible mass communications with my students and their parents. This type of project could very easily become integrated into my classroom to the extent that I could even have students working on it as part of their own projects or lessons.

Mind-Mapping Tools in Classrooms

This is an image of my mindmap creation. I use Mind42 to create it. I think this is a great graphic organization tool because it allows you to organize information very easily and can very quickly turn it into this very useable image, and you can so easily link other informational sites or student projects. I chose to use an author as the basis for my mindmap. This was great because I was able to branch off in so many directions so quickly, such as his life, his books, and themes in his writings. I definitely can see this being an interesting assessment and reflection tool at the end of a unit. It would allow students to collaborate on projects, and they could even divide up responsibility for the various branches. This way students could see the "big picture." I think it might even be a neat way for me to graphically represent the curriculum we cover over the course of the year, to give students a "big picture" version of our course and how everything fits together.

Digital Students: Teaching in Context of Culture

No one would think it makes any sense to head out into the tribes of Papua New Guinea armed with lesson plans full of laptops, video cameras, wikis, blogs or digital storytelling tools--I suppose it makes no more sense to head into a 21st century American classroom without them. I am still not sold on the idea of replacing the traditional classroom with technology, but it does make sense to integrate. I really honestly just think it is good pedagogy to be mixing things up and offering variety, and opportunities to create and explore new information. It just so happens that if technology is involved, it generally means that these things are happening. Great, interactive lessons can happen without technology, too, and they should. People shouldn't be dependent on technology, but they should have opportunities to use it to better themselves and their educations.

I found both of these videos to be interesting. The video about the college students was very poignant and exposed a lot of truths about college education. It is not only true that many college professors do not utilize technology, but that they do not even utilize good pedagogy. This combination, in this place and time, can really be devastating for students. Especially since we are paying for this education.

The video about the k-12 students reminded me of Lisa Delpit's book Other People's Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom, if only because of the moment when the children ask what would you want "if I were your son? your daughter?" It reminded of an important conflict. We as educators have to remember to value our students' education as highly as we would value that of our own children's, but that we also have to remember that not every parent wants the same for their children as we do for our own. For example, if we do paper and pencil all the time, the education will not be engaging or effective, and many parents will be angry with this. If we do "fun" interactive technology lessons all the time, without maintaining a visible level of rigor, relevance and applicability to a curriculum, we'll have yet more people to answer to. We have to find a balance between our own values, the values of our students, and the values of our students' parents.

Bloom's Taxonomy and Literacy Skills in a Technological Classroom

In a classroom that utilizes technology there will be three types of literacy in play: computer literacy, information literacy, and integration literacy. Generally, for all secondary classrooms, information literacy is an extremely important part of teaching children. We ultimately want them to be able to learn without the teacher being present, and that is exactly what information literacy is. It is knowing how and where to find information, and what to do with it when you find it. In my English classroom, this might mean researching a controversial topic, say abortion or the death penalty; students would have to know where to go to find reliable information, which is essentially a knowledge-based skill, and they would have to be able to evaluate that information to see if it is actually valid. Then, they would have to know how to synthesize that information and create something new. These are extremely high-level skills on Bloom's Taxonomy.

In today's world, we are asking student's to have another knowledge-based skill added as a component to their information literacy; and that is computer literacy. Knowing how to use a computer and how it functions has become an integral part of being able to even use information literacy skills today. People no longer know how to research, let alone present information, without the use of their computer literacy skills. It is sad in a way that older skills are phasing out, but these new computer literacy skills are very accessible and much more appealing. This makes it easier to apply students' information literacy skills.

Which brings me to the most difficult new skill for teachers: integration literacy. This is knowing how to integrate computer and information literacy in a classroom. This is no small task. It is easy enough to integrate the two on a very low level on Bloom's Taxonomy; just ask student's to research something simple and make a PowerPoint. But the best of classrooms will not only integrate technology into traditional activities, they will use it to bring students to higher levels of thinking. This can be tricky. How might technology be used to bring students to a level of synthesis, analysis or evaluation?

The Internet certainly makes it easier to attain the application level of the taxonomy. It is now easier than ever to "produce" almost anything; puzzles, movies, filmstrips, pictures with text, songs, and more. Actually, it also makes it easier, or at least far more necessary, to operate on the "evaluation" level as well. With the issue of wikis and personal websites, anyone can publish anything, so when asking students to use the internet as a resource, we are actually constantly requiring them to evaluate information and where it is coming from. This is a good thing as far as education students, but it can certainly be a bad thing in the sense that as teachers we will constantly have to be monitoring them to make sure they are accurately evaluating material.

As we move farther in the direction of technology, it will be more and more necessary for people to have higher level skills. Computer literacy does not necessarily require higher level skills at all, but we will all need them in order to distinguish between the "good" and the "bad" that is out there, especially as technology, information and advertising all become more invasive and more prevalent in our lives.

Engrade

I have to say I do particularly like this Engrade tool. It definitely makes it very convenient to manage all of the numbers. I really know nothing about gradebooks or the software out there, or how most teachers even manage their grades, but I had envisioned myself using Excel to make it easy to get quick snapshots of how everyone was doing. The thing I liked about the idea of using Excel was that I could easily make visuals out of it, to chart how my class was doing overall, compute averages, or even to analyze particular tests in order to reflect on my own ability to write reliable assessments. So, I appreciate the fact that Engrade similarly makes it easy to quickly get averages and overall pictures.

I played a little bit with the tool, and if I am understanding correctly, the students can see their own information by logging in. I think that is excellent. I had wondered how I would deal with the problem of making sure my students could track their progress in my course. Having them record their own grades in a notebook or something was the best I could come up with, but I was not pleased with that idea. Engrade would solve that problem for me.

I love the fact that I can create quizzes and mini-lessons on this site as well. Whether or not that is useful to me will depend on the level of access my classes have to technology. It would certainly make grading and recording grades a much easier process, but being that I am an English person, I am far more interested in "subjective" assessments such as short, written responses, as opposed to the multiple choice quizzes. Still, it could definitely be a useful tool, even if I only used it for occasional lessons or quizzes, and maybe used it as an extension to the grading method I set up in Excel. I definitely intend to explore with it when I have my own class and real assignments, to see if it helps me set up a grading system that I feel accurately reflects performance in my classroom.

As an answer to the blog prompts, I think students and parents would love this software because it would be an easy way to keep them informed of the student's progress in the class. This is important, especially at the secondary level, because I would have so many students that it might be difficult for me to keep the level of contact that some parents might want. I think classroom teachers in general would find Engrade useful for that reason, but also because it would make grading easier if they set up their quizzes on the site itself. I could see this being especially useful in math or science classrooms, or in English/History when doing vocabulary or terms assessments.I think Engrade could be even better if it provided visual tracking of a student's progress. For example, graphic representations like line graphs to track if there is a particular period of time in which a student was struggling or a particular type of assignment that is causing them trouble. It would also be nice if the quiz generator would also analyze the results to see if any particular question was not valid because a certain percentage of students missed it.

VoiceThread and PhotoStory Project

I created both a VoiceThread project and a PhotoStory project. I did both of mine on literary elements; one was on assonance and one was on alliteration. I found it a little difficult to follow the guidelines for making the project "personal" and still tie it into something that could be used in a classroom curriculum, but ultimately I think it is personalized in a way since it is my own narration of poetry, and my own selection of photographs from the internet.

I enjoyed the PhotoStory project far more than the VoiceThread. I could not figure out how to add music to my VoiceThread project, so that seemed to be a little lacking as far as the interest it holds. I also did not like that it is so "choppy" in moving from one picture to the next. Aside from the fact that you have to download and install PhotoStory, I really thought it was incredibly user-friendly and very professional. I was extremely impressed with how smooth the video looks at the end. It really looks like a far more involved and complicated video than what it actually is.

I definitely foresee using PhotoStory in my classroom. I think it is a great way to make very quick but very professional presentations. It would be a great replacement for another more "boring" or "traditional" assessment if I asked students to present information back to me in a PhotoStory. I would like to make sure that it still involves some higher level analysis, though, and not just information recall. My stories would not "count" as an appropriate presentation if the poems had been covered in class; however, if the student were able to find and identify assonance or alliteration on their own, or create their own verse that utilized those devices, that would be an excellent application of knowledge. I would like to make sure, however, that the use of the pictures was also somehow relevant, and not just random. It would be interesting to require the students to use historical pictures from the time of the poem, or artistic representations of that poem, in the presentation. This would add an extra element to the project.

Regardless of what the details of the project might be, I was definitely impressed by the ease of using PhotoStory, and by the overall professionalism of the project.

Tapped In Event

This week I attended an event on the Tapped In website called "Learning from Lyrics." I have to say I was disappointed in the event. There were only 2 people attending, other than myself and the instructor. The discussion was very slow and uneventful, and amounted to the instructor sharing 2 links to websites where he had posted lesson plans and his students' resulting projects. The projects themselves were interesting and insightful, and I enjoyed viewing his students' projects. I think the content that was provided was good, and I enjoyed that aspect of the event. However, the discussion itself was not at all dynamic in any way. I could probably have found equally interesting lesson plans by spending the time doing an internet search on my own. The group dynamic of a classroom or other professional development event was missing from this event. I personally have always enjoyed group discussions, and other ways of interacting with and learning from my peers, far more than lectures. Because of this I am so far having a difficult time enjoying online learning environments. I am hoping that the dynamics of our class will continue to improve as the weeks continue, and that our online class meetings will become more dynamic. Part of the problem seems to be the tool itself; there is so much involved with learning to learn in an online environment that it seems there isn't much learning going on. This felt like the case in both our online class and the Tapped In event. However, our class improves in technological skills every week, so I imagine that very soon this will no longer be an issue. I am hoping at that point to see group dynamics and other traditional classroom elements play out in the online environment. Overall, I still am preferring the traditional classroom environment, and consider the internet and technology to be useful as supplements or tools, and not replacements for meeting face-to-face with other people.

Reflection on Integration Literacy Video

I think this classroom looks very dynamic, and this woman appears to be a wonderful and engaging teacher. I love that she believes that her students should be able to teach her things that she does not know how to do. "Learning to learn" should be the principal behind all education. It is not the content that matters (well, it does, but there is more to it than that). It is the skill that matters. If it were only content, then no one would learn anything outside of school.

I do wonder though what it is she teaches. She appears to be teaching just a technology class. As an English concentration, I would be interested in seeing more about how English teachers integrate technology into their classrooms while still maintaining the traditional connections to people, discussions and actual books. I feel these aspects are exceptionally important, and that they should be enhanced, not replaced, by technology.

Reflection on Education 2.0 Video

This video really made me think about the issues that have been coming up in some of my other classes, in particular how America is falling so far behind educationally compared to the other super powers of the world today, and yet how our confidence is simply through the roof. Children of America have access to so much information, and at the same time it feels as though they really have not accessed it. American children fully and completely believe that they still have the same standing in the world as their counterparts so many generations ago, when America was the "promised land." Well, we no longer are that land, but we certainly still believe it.

This video presented the "world" of today's child as cell phones, PSPs, computers and Ipods; it's definitely an ADD nation. This was a portrait of multi-tasking, and this is confirmed by the statement "The average student today will have 10 to 14 careers." Ten to 14?? How can anyone be successful at 10 to 14 different things? This makes me feel like we are preparing our children to "float" from job to job, to try something out until it gets boring or hard and then just bounce on over to something else. If the cell phone battery dies, if you get tired of listening to music, if you get frustrated that you can't beat your video game--you just turn it off and head over to the next gadget.

What happened to this classroom?

I'm not saying no to technology. It has great resources. I'm just saying that I'm concerned that in our rush to embrace technology, maybe we are forgetting about the most important resource we have: ourselves and each other. Interacting is a skill. I hope we aren't losing it.

Picasion

This is the link to my Picasion Assignment. Overall, I found this assignment to be very easy. I already know how to make screenshots, and how to upload pictures to a website, so it was not difficult to complete this. This seems like it could be a very useful tool for keeping track of student's projects and assignments, and making sure they have actually completed them.

Creating My Blog/My First Experiences in an Online Class

This is my first experience ever blogging, so I'm not entirely sure how to start. I suppose I will start with a little bio.

I was born in and grew up in Ohio, and I really feel that is a big part of who I am. I moved to New York to go to college in the city, at New School University, where I attended for 2 years. It was a great school that focused on interdisciplinary studies, and was "alternative" in the sense that there were no tests or textbooks. Assessments were through writing, and our readings came from publications in the fields we were studying. I loved it there, but moved on after 2 years. I moved to Fishkill, where I have decided to stay, and eventually started going to the Mount. I finished my degree in English there in 2009. My son Aiden was born in December 2009, and in Spring 2010 I began my Masters program in Adolescent Education. Currently, I am attending classes, working as a substitute teacher in both Beacon and Poughkeepsie, working very part-time in the grocery department at Shoprite in Fishkill, and working at the Office of Distance Education on campus.

This is my first experience in an online course. So far, it is going okay, but it is a little frustrating. I am good with technology, so it isn't so much that I am not able to handle the different ways that we are using technology. For me, it is more that I am so used to the traditional classroom, that it is just frustrating having the entire process changed. We are all having to relearn the way a classroom works, and this is exhausting and time consuming. In the end, I guess it is better that we are learning this now rather than later.

I really would like to incorporate technology into my classroom in some way. Kids today have never known the world without technology--granted, I essentially haven't either, but my life has never been nearly as absorbed in technology as kids I see in schools today. Their daily lives work around cell phones and Ipods, and they are constantly connected to the internet. Technology has become so pervasive, but kids really should also know how to use it in constructive ways. So, if I'm going to teach that, then obviously I'll have to learn it. But my point is, I'm glad in a way that I am going through that process now, rather than trying to figure it out at the same time I'm trying to teach it.

I am excited for the many ways I could possibly use technology. As an English teacher, I will obviously be using it for research and for writing, but I'm hoping to do more. I'm hoping to challenge my students to publish themselves, at least online, and to try to involve themselves in important academic or even political "conversations." Hopefully this class will allow me to more exciting ways to incorporate technology into my classes.